Comete: Course on Mozilla Education and Technologies at Evry

Last week, Laurent Jouanneau and I taught Mozilla technologies at the University of Évry, Paris area. The Comete project was initiated by Pascal Chevrel (Mozilla-Europe) and three University teachers: Didier Courtaud (Desiderius on #xulfr and #education), Judith Benzakki and Denis Dupont.

The week began with conferences about the open web and open-source business models. The students, who weren’t involved in free software so far, have heard Tristan Nitot et Roberto di Cosmo, two of the most famous European activists! Mark Surman and David Humphrey (via video conference) shared the closing conference.

I gave the first two training days teaching XUL basics: elements, box model, chrome URLs, overlays, etc. A first, simple Firefox extension could be developed.

Laurent went on the last two days with more advanced technologies: XBL, XPCOM, themes and locales. Our extension has become a full-featured Mozilla development test case.

The course went pretty well and the students seemed very interested in the project. Paul Rouget closed the week with demos that should let everybody understand the great potential of these technologies for modern application development.

In retrospect, I regret Komodo Edit hasn’t been the mandatory text editor. I’m a Vim fanboy, I have nothing against Eclipse or Notepad++, but quite a few students used editors without any syntax highlighting nor code folding, and those who weren’t familiar with XML and JavaScript lost a lot of time. Besides, Komodo Edit has a few handy features for XUL development…

The Comete project isn’t over, it just started! Students will now get some experience working on the projects that have been proposed by the Mozilla community and local companies. There’s going to be new users on the #xulfr chan! :-)